The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.

In the last decade, states have fixated on policing their borders beyond their territorial limits. This practice, which has been called “shifting borders,” undermines state legitimacy, because the latter depends on how states exercise their power, who they exercise it over, and also on where they exercise it. As the chapter shows, shifting borders generates a tension among rights, territory, and people, where it seems that we can have any two, but not all three. This chapter examines three responses to this tension. First, Sovereigntism seeks to stabilize the relation of people and territory. Second, Democratic Cosmopolitanism tolerates shifts in territory, as long as people and rights remain. Finally, the Watershed Model keeps borders in their place, but it accepts changes in the people, as it decouples democratic governance and rights from a particular national identity. It is argued that, in the long run, this model best handles the challenges in times of planetary crises, such as global poverty and climate change. For the Watershed Model, like the grass-roots movements of indigenous peoples and transnational migrant activists, can redefine territory, allow for human mobility, and resist state overreach in border control.